The Long Glasgow Kiss

I slipped the blackjack into my inside jacket pocket. On the left, where I could pull it out with my right hand. The leaden weight of it tugged that side of my jacket, but I decided to live with it. A flat blackjack is often missed when someone frisks you: it feels like a wallet. And I didn’t feel like going out onto the street without some insurance.

I ’phoned Sneddon to arrange a meet. He told me he was tied up all day and couldn’t I give him the information over the ’phone. I said I’d rather talk to him face-to-face, and anyway it wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss over the ’phone, or some shit like that. He bought it and told me to call round in the evening, about eight-thirty.

I had ’phoned him first to make the point that calling and arranging a mutually convenient time was preferable to being lifted from the street by Twinkletoes McBride. Added to which, unlike the farmhouse out by Dumbarton, the place in Bearsden was Sneddon’s home, as well as business headquarters. Maybe I could even persuade Jimmy Costello to follow the same diary etiquette. Though I doubted it.

Before I went out, I stopped at the hall ’phone and called Lorna at home. She was bearing up well, it seemed, but her voice still sounded tired and grief-dulled. I somehow got by with a promise to ’phone her later, without calling in at the house. I did ask her if the police had been around to ask anything else and if Jack Collins had been around again. No to both questions. Then we had one of those long silences where we each waited for the other to say something. Something meaningful or comforting. Something to take us out of our depth: shallow.

‘I’ll hear from you later then,’ she said eventually, her tone still colourless, and hung up.

I drove out to the East End, to Dennistoun. Like many of the fine districts of Glasgow, it was a great thing to be able to claim that you came from Dennistoun. It was ever going back there that was to be avoided. Dennistoun was a warren of old tenements, dressed in grime that had belched from chimneys when Victoria had been a lass. As I drove into it there were gaps and clear spaces where some of the more derelict slums had been cleared. Shiny new blocks of flats were already in residence on a couple of the cleared sites.

I drove to the far side of Dennistoun, to an incongruous green patchwork square of allotments. Behind those, an equally incongruous building, made out of corrugated metal sheets bolted together and which looked like it belonged in a shipyard.

I parked and went in through a door under a sign that told the world this was McAskill’s Gymnasium. Inside, there were two practice rings, the ropes sagging and the canvas grey, and several punch bags hung unpunched from the ceiling. It was quiet in the gym. The only person was an old man in a turtleneck sweater and flat cap sitting over in the far corner on a battered old armchair, reading a newspaper. He looked up when I came in, carefully folded the newspaper and came over to me.

‘Hi, Lennox …’ Old McAskill smiled at me. It was a weary smile on a weary face that had also had more than its fair share of encounters with a gloved fist. He jerked his capped head in the direction of the office at the back. ‘He’s in there …’

I went through to the office. A lean man with a too-long face was sitting behind the desk, smoking. He looked about forty but I knew he was ten years younger than that. He had put his hat on the desktop and I could see it was the kind of wide-brimmed fedora that had been out of fashion for half-a-decade. I dropped my skinny-brimmed Borsalino on the desk next to it. To make a point.

‘Mr Lennox …’ The man smiled and stood up. He was tall. No surprise: the City of Glasgow Police had a minimum height requirement of six feet, hence the fact that at least two-thirds of their number came from outside Glasgow. He shook hands with me. Now, it has to be said that City of Glasgow cops were not in the habit of calling me ‘Mister’ or shaking hands with me, unless it was to snap a pair of cuffs on me. But Detective Constable Donald Taylor was different. We had an arrangement.

‘Thanks for coming, Donald. You on duty?’

‘Backshift. Start at two.’

‘Did you find out anything about what I asked you?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much, I’m afraid, Mr Lennox. Bobby Kirkcaldy isn’t Glaswegian. He was born in Motherwell. To sniff around any more I’d have to contact the Lanarkshire County Police. That would start questions.’

‘But you would at least be able to check out whether he has a record or not.’

‘Oh aye … I did that. Nothing. And from what I can gather there are no rumours about him. He seems to be straight.’

‘What about the other thing? Small Change MacFarlane?’

‘Sorry … no joy there either. I’m not on the case and, again, if I start asking too many questions, the gaffers’ll get suspicious. I did talk to the evidence sergeant though. Conversational, like. He said they took tons of stuff away from MacFarlane’s place. With his missus’s say-so, like.’